“The message of my art is simple yet vast: to affirm the worth of human tenderness and the endurance of beauty.”

In the book On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry explores the philosophical nature and repercussions of beauty. She argues that beauty incites truth and a sense of equality, leading to a heightened "perceptual acuity" that is foundational for recognising and addressing injustice. This stance is part of the early movement challenging postmodern irony that dominated art discourse from the 1980s to the 2000s. This new perspective gave rise to what has been termed "New Sincerity" or "Post-Ironic" expression.

In this post-ironic era, beauty and authenticity are no longer seen as escapism or mere commercial art. Instead, they became a stance against irony and its default mode of distance. In E Unibus Pluram, David Foster Wallace identified irony as a 'cage' that prevents genuine communication; similarly, artist Josephine Florens, a Ukrainian painter living in Germany, infuses her body of work with a sincerity free from naivety, where silence, beauty, and tenderness coexist with themes of war and displacement. Her body of work embodies a sophisticated conceptual contemporary awareness without the scepticism, creating a stance she names "modern vintage”.

Florens’s visual language relies on three strategies—beauty, slowness, and light —a roadmap you can see permeate her entire body of work. In the painting DEFENDERS OF UKRAINE (2022), there is intentional meditative and slow brushwork, where it seems every detail matters, but also an acute awareness of contemporary atmospheres. The artist does not rely on didactic imagery or protest aesthetics but instead on a conceptual line that states that "beauty can be a form of moral resistance". In a work commemorating those who protect, she chooses to preserve tenderness itself, utilising light over darkness and intimacy over heroic spectacle. In this preservation of beauty and the quiet moments in nature or in observation, she reminds us that what we defend is not territory, but the capacity for preservation of what makes us human. 

Florens's inner landscapes of human experiences, depicted with classical techniques and a muted palette, create what might be referred to as 'emotional portraiture of space'. Following the same framework as her generational peer, Salman Toor's commitment to sincere beauty and traditional techniques. Yet, where Toor populates his spaces with figures in proximity or in conversation, navigating cultural displacement through social gathering, Florens often does the opposite, exploring displacement through absence, only allowing light to be the protagonist. While Toor asks, ‘Who belongs here?’, Florens's work explores 'What remains when we leave?' The artist's new series, titled AMERICAN LIGHT, exemplifies this exactly, exploring light as a metaphor for belonging, memory, and resilience, creating a dialogue between cultures where light “becomes both theme and bridge.”

The stance of beauty as an ethical position and slowness as counter-cultural is evident in her choice of medium and imagery. With a transparent oil layering technique that requires time. "I aim for slowness, for an art that invites contemplation rather than consumption." Florens radically counters the attention economy; not only her use of material and technique but also her inspirations and creative process become a network that later feeds her practice. It begins with quiet noticing and the stillness of things that surround her, from shadows on the walls to expressions of a person, having a deep root in sincerity as a conceptual framework, but also as a way to approach the work and inspiration.

“The style I call 'modern vintage' bridges classical composition with present-day sensitivity, creating an atmosphere where time dissolves. Through this, I hope to remind that beauty, when grounded in honesty, remains relevant in every era,” the artist tells me. “My place in contemporary art is not defined by novelty but by persistence: a belief that truth of feeling is itself contemporary.”

The intimism of the artist's work recalls Carl Larsson and Fairfield Porter reimagined through 21st-century displacement; she paints home as memory rather than possession. Her modern vintage aesthetic transforms domestic space into philosophical territory, where Larsson's 1890 utopian views of reforming life through beauty become a 2025 take with full knowledge of the 20th century's ruptures. Her painting sees home not as an achieved paradise, but as a remembered sanctuary, where light carries a historical weight of war that Larsson could not yet know.

If you look at Florens' practice through the lens of figurative work across contemporary artists, Michael Borremans comes to mind as an essential contrast. Even though they are technically similar – transparent layers, muted palettes, and classical composition – they have a very crucial difference. Borremans's Belgium studio develops deeply unsettling paintings with bodies in vulnerability or violence, ambiguous narratives, or beauty deployed to disturb. Where postmodern beauty is problematic, self-aware, and tied with a glimpse of horror, Florens is quite the opposite. Her paintings, or quiet reflections, are not problematic but rather necessary. Where she asks what can be preserved in the midst of war and spectacle, where she highlights the “quiet heroism of ordinary people, the resilience of tenderness, the courage to continue.” In a sense, they represent two roads diverging from classical technique: one toward contemporary darkness, one toward post-ironic light.

Florens occupies a curious position in contemporary painting—neither wholly traditional nor conventionally avant-garde, yet it is distinctly contemporary, operating as what she calls 'quiet activism', and her professional trajectory suggests that quietness is gaining institutional voice.  Her recent appointment to the CAA Annual Conference Committee of the College Art Association (2026-2029) positions her as a theorist of how beauty itself can become ethical, advocating for the same values her practice thrives on: artistic freedom, ethical practice, and meaningful cross-cultural exchange. As her institutional voice amplifies and her practice circulates more widely, her philosophy —that tenderness, light and slowness, can be an act of resistance—will be thoroughly tested not merely in galleries alone but in the broader discourse she's now positioned to shape. The main question isn't whether her work is contemporary—it's whether we're contemporary enough to understand it.

Learn more about the artist here.

Cover image:

In The West Of Ukraine (Kostrycha Mountain). Oil on canvas, 50 cm x 70 cm, 2023. By Josephine Florens.

Images courtesy of Josephine Florens.